AM05: Colonial map collections: new approaches and methodologies

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AM05

Colonial map collections: new approaches and methodologies

Convenor:: Joy Slappnig (Royal Holloway, University of London)
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Discussant:: Felix Driver (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Stream:: Archives and Museums

Sessions:: Wednesday 16 September, 13:00-14:30, 15:00-16:30
Time zone: Europe/London

Short Abstract:

This session brings together presenters from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds working with map collections assembled during the European colonial era, with the aim to discuss ways of studying, curating, displaying, improving access to and ultimately decolonising these collections.

Long Abstract:

This session brings together presenters from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds working with historical map collections, specifically map collections assembled during the European colonial era. The aim of this session is to discuss ways of studying, curating, displaying, improving access to and ultimately decolonising these collections.

Beginning with Brian Harley, scholars have described maps created during the time of European colonialism as instruments of power. While undoubtedly true for most European maps, especially those made by official mapping agencies, a much greater variety of maps were produced during that time. Often hybrid in both form and content, a diverse group of actors were involved in the creation of these maps, including Indigenous peoples. When these maps were accessioned into Western collections, they were catalogued according to western conventions, often dividing them up into the simplistic binary of scientific/traditional or European/non-European. The development of relational approaches to material culture, especially in the study of ethnographic museum collections over the last decade, calls for a new approach to Western map collections.

This session welcomes speakers and participants from different academic and professional backgrounds so that the greatest possible variety of approaches to colonial map collections can be introduced. Paper proposals addressing the materiality of maps and discussing experiences in curating, displaying, digitising, and collaboratively working with map collections are particularly encouraged.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Wednesday 16 September, 2020, 13:00-14:30

The cartography of Kallihirua: Inughuit abduction and indigenous map making

Peter Martin (University of Cambridge)

Colonial Amerindian Maps: the limits of a study without an historical-ethnographic context

Benjamin Balloy (Musée du quai Branly - J. Chirac)

Revitalizing Indigenous Knowledge Through Interactive Digital Maps

Joshua Manitowabi (Brock University)

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Paper short abstract:

Anishinaabe scholars today are making ways and space for other Anishinaabe academics to recognize their ways of knowing as a legitimate research methodology using their language. This presentation will give examples of traditional Anishinaabe stories using Dibaajmowin, Aadzookaan, and Aansookaan.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous peoples have sought to be and are increasingly involved in the designing and selecting of content and methods of presentation of museum exhibits and educational curricula about their own cultures and histories. Maps have traditionally been used to situate a people in a spatial area and sometimes to graphically represent aspects of their culture. However, museum maps and historical cartography in general had ethnocentric and colonialist biases and thus misrepresented Indigenous peoples' views of their territory, their cultural knowledge, and their histories. These maps tended to present Indigenous cultures, socio-political structures, and territories as static or disappearing rather than as vibrant, evolving cultures. How can new possibilities within Indigenous counter-mapping aid land claim negotiations and/or decolonizing space and place?

This presentation will examine the potential of Indigenous interactive mapping to facilitate greater Indigenous community involvement in portraying, preserving, and revitalizing their culture and relationship to their land within Indigenous resurgences. In addition, interactive mapping will be examined for its potential to address the limitations of static mapping in presenting a true Indigenous perspective, one that would involve incorporating traditional ways of imparting knowledge, such as storytelling, oral history, art, music, and dance. From the user's perspective, this type of modern technology for constructing digital maps can offer alternative perspectives of Indigenous cultural representations while simultaneously providing new insights within contested areas of space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

From conservation to computer vision - curating the 'War Office Archive' of colonial-era maps held at the British Library

Nick Dykes (British Library)

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Paper short abstract:

At the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly manuscript maps covering large parts of the world. Conservation, cataloguing, digitisation and computer vision analysis is under way at the British Library to open up the archive to researchers worldwide.

Paper long abstract:

Around the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly hand-drawn maps covering large parts of the world where detailed and reliable surveys were not otherwise available. The maps were gathered from a rich variety of sources including military expeditions, boundary commissions, explorers, travellers, missionaries and spies, and they were used by the War Office for making and revising official printed products.

From sketch maps made by intelligence officers, through surveyors' field sheets to cartographers' fair drawings, most of the items are unique manuscripts that show regions from a European perspective immediately before and during the colonial era. The maps are now held at the British Library in the 'War Office Archive'.

With generous funding from Indigo Trust almost 2,000 maps covering large parts of eastern Africa have been conserved, catalogued and digitised, and around 1,300 sheets relating to western Asia are currently being digitised in work sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. A further 2,500 items relating to China have been catalogued.

In many cases the maps are unique sources of historical data, providing evidence of populations, settlements and ethnic regions, and describing land use, limits of vegetation, hydrology and much else. We are trialling automated transcription techniques to harvest this data in preparation for analysis by researchers.

Nick Dykes, Curator of Modern Maps at the British Library, will provide an introduction to the archive, and describe the work being done to make the archive available for research worldwide.

Reading with and against the grain of a nineteenth century colonial map collection: the case of John Arrowsmith

Johanna Skurnik (University of Sussex)

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses maps of the nineteenth-century mapmaker John Arrowsmith in the map collection of the British Colonial Office. I read the maps with and against the grain of prevailing written documentation and shed light on the material histories of the maps.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation discusses the colonial map collection of the British Colonial Office, housed at the National Archives, Kew. I examine the contributions that mapmaker John Arrowsmith made to it between the 1830s and the early 1860s. During these decades Arrowsmith was the semi-official mapmaker of the Colonial Office and many of his maps accumulated into the department's collections on an ad hoc basis. They included printed maps of the colonies but also manuscript tracings and are now available for consultation bound in the volumes of correspondence and as separate map files.

At Kew the maps are stored close to much of the material that helped generate them: the colonial map tracings and survey and exploration reports that arrived from the colonies. However, these maps form only a fraction of a globally dispersed colonial map 'collection'. As commercial commodities the maps found their ways to diverse geographical settings and consequently to many collections. Many of these maps are currently highly valued collectibles.

This presentation discusses ways to read the maps with and against the grain of the prevailing written documentation. I provide a multifaceted interpretation of their position in colonial governance and analyse the contributions of different actors to their making (ranging from indigenous and settler informants to draftsmen on the mapmaker's payroll). By taking examples concerning different colonies, I discuss the cultural and material histories that the collection encloses, including disputes over 'correct' knowledge and copyright, the authority of maps as well as histories of maps that were not made.

"Colors of Paradise: Mapping Race in the Eighteenth-Century Île de Bourbon"

George Milne (Oakland University)

From Roanoke to Aden: colonial maps in The National Archives, London

Rose Mitchell (The National Archives)

Researching Indigenous maps in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society

Joy Slappnig (Royal Holloway, University of London)